[haunter]

> the internet would be much better if none of the big players ever entered it, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc,

How this could have been possible? Like there must have been some outside regulations in the late 90s/early 2000s. Maybe as an effect of the dotcom bubble?

Also it’s a good theory but doesn’t fit the capitalist picture at all.

[lotsofpulp]

There was no option due to lack of upload bandwidth for individuals at their home. And CGNAT.

If there had been significant populations with sufficient upload capacity, and ipv6, then there could have been a market for network devices that operated out of people’s homes under their own control.

Not that this would have ensured that big players would not exist, but it could have technically allowed a solution to be innovated.

The other option I can think of is a federal government provided email utility using post offices for identity verification and stiff penalties for spam/malware, to create a “trusted“ network, as opposed to using opaque processes from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Meta to create a “trusted” network.

[midasuni]

For running mail you don’t need upload bandwidth, and in my country certainly outside of mobile, CG nat isn’t a thing. Static IPs tend to cost a pound or two more a month from many ISPs but not all.

20 years ago, and of course before then in the dialup age, your ISP operated your mail, so there was plenty of competition. Free at the point of use mail which meant you weren’t locked to a single ISP so there were benefits, but the big benefit was the unlimited space that the funding of companies like google allowed for, they could muscle in and knock out competition.

Eventually isps stopped providing as demand was tiny and the cost outweighed it. Same with things like nntp servers.

I pay a couple of quid a month to Zoho to provide my mail, off my own domain. Obviously I have static ip4 and 6 addresses from my ISP, but I’m happy to outsource as long as the cost is transparent and I’m not locked in, so I do. Part of that is to fund companies which are better armed to fight against monopolistic email practices than I am on my own.

There are other suppliers I can shift to by moving my MX records and updating a couple of TXTs, but there’s no need to at the moment.

[lotsofpulp]

> For running mail you don’t need upload bandwidth, and in my country certainly outside of mobile, CG nat isn’t a thing. Static IPs tend to cost a pound or two more a month from many ISPs but not all.

The thing is it cannot just be mail thing, to make it economically and time wise worth it. I can pay relatively little per month and have Apple/Google/Microsoft to take care of all of my needs, from email to file syncing to photo and phone backups, with the big risk that I can get arbitrarily locked out at any given moment.

But to offset this convenience, people would need an all in one, easy to setup, plug and play device that does it all. Something like a Synology NAS, where all they have to do is answer a few prompts about their domain and at most, swap in and out HDD when and if the disks or the NAS fail.